This looks like the whole scene is way overlit. It has the "inside the oven" look to it.

Instead of removing or decreasing lights, start over.

Add an IBL perhaps even with no image, white, no more than 5% to 10%. Are you using P8? If so, enable IDL. Otherwise in P7 or less enable AO on the light. We can discuss the parameter of the AO later - there are plenty of threads on that subject. The purpose of the AO is to provide ambient (or secondary or bounced) lighting.

Then add a light  (or lights) that are motivated by the actual lighting found in a real room.

If the room is lit by one ceiling fixture, then add one point light. If the room is lit by several wall fixtures, then add several point lights.

If the room is lit by a spotlight, then add a spotlight. Find where the real light sources would be and put simulated ones in the same places.

I can see that your cabinet shelves are lit absurdly.

You clearly have too much light on and shadows not turned on.

 sorry should have said - i'm using poser pro 2010 with premade lights from the scene that you warned me about over at the rDNA forum
Love esther

 i thought decreasing their intensity by 50% for all lights would fix the problem

 should the IBL have shadows on?

 now the render is at 40% - very slow.  But I hope the pic will be good at the end of it.

BB is correct.  There appears to be too much lighting in the scene.  You did not specify what type of lighting arrangement came with the room but it is obvious that is was never created with gamma correction in mind. 

If IBL exists, it may account for the overall brightness within your food cabinet and microwave oven.  It is an ambient light fake which, unfortunately, is not suitable for many interior scenes.  And IBL does not cast shadows at all nor can shadows be turned on. 

Follow BB's recommendations, create your own light set for this particular room.  It will be a better improvement.

And if you are referring to your library icons, I would check to see if those folders contain RSR format instead of PNG image files.  That is still a problem with older content.

 hi, yes the library content is old.  I'm on a mac too.
The original light set was designed way before the advent of IDL.
So to compensate for the brightness I did try turning light intensity down to 50% (second render) however that didn't help, so now I am trying the BB way.  will keep you all posted.

 but the BB way is taking forever to render.  It's been literally hours!

You have reflections in your scene which will increase render time.  Try decreasing your pixel sampling to 3 and raytrace bounces to 3 to see if you can speed things up.

Pointlights can be really slow - perhaps switch to spot lights.

This is the kind of situation where you do not want to be experimenting with lights - you have a ton of reflective surfaces, and some with transparency or refraction. This is a very demanding scene to render, and is not very suitable for test rendering. It takes too long per iteration.

I have found that lighting a room with all materials set to plain white lets me learn a lot more quickly what works and doesn't. If this is taking literally hours, then perhaps you'd save time by doing that.

Make a copy of the scene. Get rid of the figure. Remove reflection from all the shiny surfaces.

Also, both for your test scene and for your final, make sure the Diffuse_Value is .8 or less on all surfaces that have bright diffuse colors.

esther.. there is no need to wait such a long time for basic lighting setup renders. You want them done in a couple of minutes maximum... at least, I would.

While you are working on the overall lighting, I would suggest switching off details that slow the render down but don't much affect the lighting, like reflections. You could do that, for example, by reducing the RT bounces to 0 or 1 - this will still leave you 1 IDL bounce for basic IDL lighting. If you want more IDL bounces at this stage, use the D3D FF Render script to control the IDL bounces setting independently of the RT bounces setting.

You can also use a much lower IDL IC to begin with. If you set the normal render settings IC to zero, the IDL IC will be 25. You can increase those again when the basic lighting is closer to what you want. You are using IC 34 in the standard render settings, which gives you an IDL IC setting of 48.8 - fairly high. Again, you can use the D3D script to control this directly.

Hope this helps relieve your frustration a bit!
Izi

Edit: x-post... much better to do what he said!

 "I have found that lighting a room with all materials set to plain white lets me learn a lot more quickly what works and doesn't. If this is taking literally hours, then perhaps you'd save time by doing that."
I'm actually trying draft but turning on shadows and firefly and I think I can see fairly well my trial and error results now,and it's not taking too horribly long comparatively.  I'm still struggling though but will try some spotlights next.
Love esther

This is slightly OT, and perhaps ought to be a separate thread, but I'm running into some inter-dependencies in the render settings that confuzzled me for a bit.

For example, in the D3D FF Render script, IDL does not work at all unless you have RT bounces > zero. It doesn't matter how many IDL Bounces are set. So my suggestion above about disabling reflections by setting RT bounces = 0 (with IDL bounces >= 1) won't work.

The Irradiance Sample Size has a significant effect on Indirect Light pre-calculation. Is this setting documented anywhere? If so, I can't find it...

Not much is documented. Look for posts by stewer back when P8 came out. We were all experimenting and reverse engineering it. He dropped in here and there.

I'd look it up, but I barely have time to post. My daughter is coming with many college friends and my wife has me doing chores right and left and cooking and cleaning, as if I need to impress a bunch of college freshmen. Bah! I just want to start partying NOW!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2778431&page=8#message_3498725

I'm sure you can wow them with a few simple quadratics.

Actually I was doing this little math doodle in my head while driving and was quite surprised at the result.

You know how for linear workflow we take incoming material and using the gamma power 2.2, we anti-gamma correct a texture map?

clr = map ** 2.2

Then we plug that into a Diffuse node. The diffuse node does an internal calculation to determine the illumination and multiply that with the incoming clr. Let's call that illumination I.

So the output of the diffuse is:

diffout = clr * I

Then, assuming no specular, we gamma correct for the final output by using the inverse power of 2.2.

out = diffout ** (1 / 2.2)

Now string all that together in one equation:

out = ((map ** 2.2) * I) ** (1/ 2.2)

Now using the algebraic identity (p * q) ** r = (p ** r) * (q ** r), this becomes

out = ((map ** 2.2) ** (1 / 2.2)) * (I ** (1 / 2.2))

Now using the algebraic identity (p ** q) ** r = p ** (q * r) we get

out = (map ** (2.2 * 1/2.2)) * (I ** (1 / 2.2))

Since 2.2 * 1/2.2 is just 1, they cancel and we are left with:

out = map * (I ** (1 / 2.2))

Look - assuming a diffuse-only shader, you don't need to anti-gamma the input. Just gamma correct a diffuse node all by itself and multiply that with the color map as is.

...

Well, I was impressed with this analysis.

That's very sweet!

Taking this further, first thinking about the specular. A separate specular calculation, attenuating the Diffuse_Value to preserve the energy balance, separately GC'd, and finally added to the GC'd Diffuse?

Who is going to break this to RV?
:O)

Do you have shadows enabled? I just don't see any.

 that was an indoor light set that came with poser pro 2010 and thenI added the spotlight.
Are the bowl artifacts caused by my low qual render settings?
Love esther

 Light 2 is a point light and has also got shadows on.

Quote - Who is going to break this to RV?
:O)

EstherAU did - thanks Esther!

So, did I get this right:

I can see no occlusion at all, either shadows or from IDL. Do you still have the IBL switched on?

What happens if you render with all lights except one (spotlight or pointlight) switched off?

By the way, although it's not relevant at this point, the two worktop surfaces nearest the camera are showing the same problem that I had on a flat table top in the Geisha Room freebie from Ladonna. Although the surface appears flat, the reflections are not flat, as though the surface is ballooned outwards. (The spoons also appear to be floating above the surface. This may or may not be related). I never found the cause of this problem on the table, and had to hide it by placing another surface immediately above the table top.

Ummm, no I don't think so.
I think it's like this.

Top right is the Diffuse node (I in bb's formula)
Top left is Gamma Correcting the Diffuse node ( I ** 1/2.2)
Bottom right is the color map (map)
Bottom left is multiplying the GC'd Diffuse by the color map. (map * (I ** 1/2.2))

 funny you should mention ballooning, because if I render with smooth polygons on the refrigerator balloons, so maybe smooth polys is still on for reflections even when it's off for the rest of the scene?

there is an IBL in the scene, and indirect light is checked.  How do I know if the IBL is activated??
Love esther
PS I did try the BB suggestion of one light and one IBL first but the scene was way too dark.  Maybe I did something wrong. I didn't post this example.

Quote -  funny you should mention ballooning, because if I render with smooth polygons on the refrigerator balloons, so maybe smooth polys is still on for reflections even when it's off for the rest of the scene?

That's certainly what it seems like, although I'm not sure about the validity of this explanation. In any case I couldn't fix it, so I had to hide it.

Quote - there is an IBL in the scene, and indirect light is checked.  How do I know if the IBL is activated??

I just meant is the IBL light switched on? If so, I would guess that it is overpowering the IDL. IBL lighting is a bodge from before the days of IDL and you don't need it here. I would switch the light off or delete it.

The question is: does IBL play nice with IDL?  There were issues with it in P8 and it was tricky to balance the two.  I would completely eliminate the IBL temporarily and concentrate allowing the IDL do the ambient lighting.  Although you mentioned BB's one light/one IBL combination to be too dark, that may be the more realistic lighting response given the situation.  The intensities may require to be increased.

Quote - Top right is the Diffuse node (I in bb's formula)
Top left is Gamma Correcting the Diffuse node ( I ** 1/2.2)
Bottom right is the color map (map)
Bottom left is multiplying the GC'd Diffuse by the color map. (map * (I ** 1/2.2))

A few questions... why does Value_2 in your Add node have a 1? Doesn't 2.2 + 1 = 3.2?

Also, my understanding is that the Diffuse Node Value_1 channel should never be 1... .85 or something like that. I'm not questioning anyone's anything... just trying to learn.

So:

Surface.Alternate_Diffuse = ImageMap("toon1.png") * (Diffuse() ** (1/Add(2.2, 1)))

This generated your shader.

I apologise for hijacking your thread, Esther. I'll move this off to another thread... good idea?

Quote -  why does Value_2 in your Add node have a 1? Doesn't 2.2 + 1 = 3.2?

Because I didn't notice it... yes, it should be zero!

Quote - Also, my understanding is that the Diffuse Node Value_1 channel should never be 1... .85 or something like that.

Agreed, if this setup was to be used as a complete shader. I was concentrating on getting the basic structure of bb's formula. For a more complete shader, the settings would have to be worked out in conjunction with the other parts. For example, calculated Specular might be used to attenuate Diffuse, so a Diffuse node Value_1 = 1.0 could be valid, since the actual value will be controlled by the input.

There's no colour map either.

 got to go worknow.

Quote - I apologise for hijacking your thread, Esther. I'll move this off to another thread... good idea?

My apologies also, Esther, let's get back to your piccy and continue the discussion about bb's revelation (sorry, analysis) in another thread.

Quote - I turned the intensity down to zero on most of the lights.  does this count as switching the lights off.

Yes, or you could just use the On/off tickbox in the light's Properties pane. Also, you can turn them on/off by Alt-Clicking the light in the Light Control pane

I think it's a big improvement, with some shadows and occlusion starting to show, giving it all much more depth. I'm fairly sure it would have been the IBL light washing everything out in the previous pics. Some positioned lights (not IBL) can be turned up a bit now to bounce a bit more IDL around the scene, perhaps.

I also notice that the light position(s) are off.  They are coming from a non-realistic angle. 

I would also double check the shaders on all materials.  We might have an instance of self illumination if ambient settings and alt_diffuse plugins are used.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2798837

 thanks everyone. I am away for a few days but I will try the lighting again when I get home.
Love esther

Enjoy.  We will see you when you get back.

Quote -  thanks everyone. I am away for a few days but I will try the lighting again when I get home.
Love esther

1.look delete every light in the scene. every light. and then create a new light.

1. make every material a white diffue with value 0.8.
2. never use lights without shadows. never.

render.

i allways test my lighting with white diffuse. its fast and i get a sense where color bleeding is happening and how dark the shadows are.

will you do this?

Hi, I'm back but only until tomorrow morning.  Is there a script that can set al lthe materials with white diffuse to 0.8?   I have a lto of materials in the scene. 
Surely not all lights need shadows?
Love esther

 there is still a spotlight in the above scene but i"m not sure it is anywhere near where it can do any good.  I've just turned it into a diffuse light and am re-rendering.
Love esther

this seen still has one infinite light.

Esther, you said you 'changed the spotlight to another diffuse light'. I don't really understand what you mean by this, because a spotlight does emit diffuse light, as well as specular. What do you mean by a 'diffuse light'?

On my work display the last render looks worse in one respect, but better in two others. It looks like you have way too much light in this render, whereas the previous one looked about right. However, in the latest render the reflections in the fridge door and the shading inside the cupboard are both much better. I think the previous render had a light without shadows illuminating the inside of the cupboard in front of the boy's legs (yes, there is a strong argument for never using direct lights without shadows!), and also giving too much specular reflection off the fridge door.

 I think I mean IBL for diffuse.  when I select light type I think it is called diffuse IBL?
anyway , i just couldn't get hte spotlight into the right positon because of the rotating/positioning problems I mentioned before.
If it's too bright I could just reduce intensity??
Love esther

I think she means she changed them to IBL. Which is generally not a useful thing to do.

I bet the reflections get stronger when the lights get stronger because the shader has Reflect_Lite_Mult enabled or Reflect_Kd_Mult enabled, both of which I have said a bajillion times should never be on.

For many of us each kind of light is no mystery and trying them at random is unthinkable. But for Esther and many others, it is a mystery.

I keep meaning to make a tutorial about lighting basics, including how to position and aim them. But this is best done as a video - a written tutorial will not show the workflow very easily. I'm having trouble finding a good free video capture program that does all I want (dynamic pan and zoom) and doesn't lose synchronization of audio and video when I render.

NOTE: Cross-posted

 yes, a video tutorial would really be useful.
Maybe just a set of screen caps would be a good start.
PhilC might know how to make a video though.